On Thursday, I took a look at whether the St. Louis Cardinals have the payroll flexibility necessary to sign Jason Heyward to a long-term extension. In that post, I included a graphic with the Cardinals' guaranteed salary obligations from 2015 through 2020 that included where St. Louis ranks in MLB in terms of those commitments. A few folks inquired where I got the information for the rankings. The answer, of course, is the indispensable Cot's Baseball Contracts, which is now under the Baseball Prospectus umbrella.
Cot's has spreadsheets for each major-league club—excluding Toronto, for whatever reason—from 2015 through 2020. I collected that data from each of the Cot's team pages and put it into a spreadsheet. Then I sorted for the rankings. Some readers asked if I'd be sharing this information in a later post. So I thought I'd do so today. I put together a graphic that ranks all of the MLB clubs (except the Blue Jays) by their total overall salary obligation combined from 2015 through 2020.
Keep in mind that each club's 2015 salary obligation is not yet set. There are still pending arbitration cases for some clubs, like the Cardinals and Jon Jay. MLB has not yet set the league minimum and club's have not yet executed contracts for players eligible for that level of salary. The 2015 figure for every club will change before opening day. Nonetheless, it gives us an idea of a club's guaranteed major-league salary obligations for the coming season and those beyond.
Please share your observations in the comments.